Arts & Culture | Movies

Attack of the Six-Foot Woman

Hannah Walhout on body horror, ‘Attack of the 50 Foot Woman,’ and the growing pains of being the tall girl.

Recently, in the depths of months of quarantining, I found myself scrolling through the Warner Archive’s database of films when I happened upon the 1958 cult classic Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. It felt like a wink from the universe.

Not long before, I’d had a conversation with a friend who lived across the country, who, like me, is a woman close to six feet in height. At some point our catch-up call turned, as it had many times before, to our shared experiences of tallness. We reminisced about the years when we had lived in the same city and how walking down the street together seemed to always amount to something near a spectacle. Being a tall woman means living with a running commentary from those around you—put two of them together, and the show is on. What did people think of us, two blonde giants towering over the sidewalk? I sighed, and then laughed, imagining some five-foot-eight guy cowering in fear as we passed.

The opening moments of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman follow Nancy Fowler Archer, played in all her melodramatic glory by B-movie standby Allison Hayes, as she drives down Route 66 through the California night. Suddenly, as the camera winds through the sagebrush and sandstone, a large, shining, spherical spaceship appears out of nowhere in the middle of the road. (Or, at least, that’s the idea; the special effects leave something to be desired.) Nancy veers out of the way and totals her car. Somehow, she is able to escape from the scene—but not before the pilot of the mysterious ship emerges, a huge mottled hand coming into frame to grasp for the plum-sized diamond around her neck.

The next evening, Nancy insists on returning to the desert, this time with her husband, Harry (William Hudson). Despite being waved away by the town’s smirking police chief, she is certain that the previous night’s events represented an encounter with an extraterrestrial being. She knows what happened to her, and she needs to be believed. This night plays out in roughly the same fashion as the first: ship descends, car swerves, alien emerges. But this time, Nancy isn’t so lucky. She is snatched by the mottled hand of the giant man—who, for reasons unknown, is dressed like a medieval dungeon master—and, incredibly, Harry eagerly hops back into the car to go tell his side piece, Honey (Yvette Vickers), that his wife is finally out of the picture.

That is, until an unconscious Nancy is returned home by her kidnapper, placed gingerly on top of her pool house. She is taken inside to rest and be attended to by her physician, Dr. Cushing (Roy Gordon). But now, something in Nancy is changing. Unbeknownst to those around her, she has been exposed to that 1950s sci-fi bogeyman: radiation. Within a matter of hours, Nancy’s compact, slender frame will expand upwards and outwards with vigor, transforming a troubled woman into the film’s titular freak. Radiation, as we know, does strange and terrible things to the body.

*

I first learned that I was tall from a photograph. I don’t think I quite knew it at the time the photo was taken—that morning I had simply dressed up, like everyone else in the fifth grade, for the class picture. I wore a navy-blue turtleneck with bright-blue cargo capris and, around my neck, the spoils of summer: a necklace from Girl Scout camp on which each pony bead and charm represented another year under my belt or another skill learned. I was proud.

When the copies of the class picture arrived at our house, I opened the envelope at our kitchen table and eagerly examined the outcome. Excited, as always, to see how my outfit had registered on camera, I scanned past the short kids sitting crisscross applesauce in the front row, the delicate littlest girls and the pipsqueaky boys. I noticed kids in prints of trains and butterflies next to kids wearing short skirts and brand-name sneakers. I saw our stern but caring teacher, Mrs. T. And then my eyes were drawn to a giant color block of blue in the center of the back row, a blonde head rising above everyone around me. I felt exposed, my stomach sinking. Was that me?

At the risk of sounding dramatic, it may have been then that I developed self-consciousness—or, rather, a consciousness of my self. (If most people’s existential crises stem from an awareness of their own mortality, maybe my first came from a sudden awareness of my own now-unusual body.) I hadn’t been the tall girl in years past; now, I would be forever. Years later, this feeling would fleetingly resurface when I watched the 2019 Netflix high school comedy Tall Girl, which explores the experience of being just that—the stereotypes, the romantic complications, the insecurities of shorter men. “Having back-row-center placement in all of your class photos,” Jodi, the six-foot-one main character, says, “isn’t exactly a self-esteem booster.”

That night, I lay in bed unable to fall asleep. My lower half was racked with growing pains—a sure sign, I thought, that my body was in the process of transmogrifying. The pain felt like tiny cranks in some sort of creaking bone-stretching contraption, slowly lengthening my shins upward and widening my hips outward. My growing body seemed achy and abuzz all at once, and I felt it wasn’t quite mine. It is horrifying to realize that your body is doing something entirely independent of your brain.

Eventually, my mother, a doctor, came to sit with me, carefully swaddling my shins in tight Ace bandages to help with the dull throbbing. As she placed hot water bottles on each of my legs and pulled the blanket over me, I asked her to tell me what growing pains are for. I might as well have been asking, Why is this happening to me?

She couldn’t tell me, of course; human growth is a complicated process. All she could do was stroke my hair and tell me my body was going to change, and that sometimes it hurts.

*

In my teenage years, all my cautious estimates and educated guesses as to how tall I could become came and went. (It didn’t help that my body was also growing outward, fat rising like a proofing sourdough and bubbling up in heretofore neglected areas.) My grandmothers were both in the area of five foot five—a height I have no memory of being, since it likely didn’t last more than a few months. My mom and her sisters were around five foot eight. I zoomed past that at fourteen. Feeling like my body was out of control, I figured that my only remaining option would be to try to fudge the numbers when people asked how tall I was.

In class, I would slouch, trying to appear shorter. If I was included in a group photo, I set myself a bit behind everyone else, trying to use perspective to my advantage. Every time I went to the doctor, I would hunch as the assistant lowered the spindly metal measuring device onto my head, as though tricking the official record could change the course of history. I’m not the only one who did this; studies have shown that women who are tall in their adolescence and college years often engage in such sleights of hand.

I began learning what female tallness meant: stares from oblivious strangers, observations from well-meaning classmates, clothes that never fit, dances never attended. (I tended to avoid situations that called for strappy, sparkly high heels, which struck fear in my heart, though dates weren’t exactly knocking down my door.) I had boy friends, but no boyfriends. In the height of the boot-cut era, when awkward hemlines ensued, I defiantly made cuffed jeans my signature look—all the while wishing I could pull off the designer denim everyone else seemed to have.

So many of the ways in which teenagers “fit in” felt impossible to me, whether or not they actually were. The effect of all this is the same, I suppose: to let you know that you are different, and to help you internalize the truth of adolescence that difference is, for the most part, bad.

*

Other than being beautiful and white, Nancy Fowler Archer is far from the American “feminine ideal” of the 1950s—even when she could be measured on a standard human scale. This is not the demure suburban housewife. She’s extremely rich, for one thing. She owns a Modernist mansion, where she keeps her philandering husband well taken care of by her pocketbook and her faithful butler, Jess (Ken Terrell). Her marriage is messy; she’s left Harry on at least one occasion, unwilling to abide his cheating. She is also, it’s implied, an alcoholic, one who has been sent to the sanitarium on more than one occasion for her “mental exhaustion,” “overworked imagination,” and “violent headaches.” Over the years, her family physician observes that “her health seemed to rise and fall with the tide of her emotions.”

Later that night, as Nancy continues to rest after her mysterious kidnapping, her husband and his mistress concoct a plan. Harry sneaks into Nancy’s room, intent on injecting her with a lethal amount of sedative, which would leave him free to run off with Honey—a woman far less complicated and difficult than his wife. He tiptoes up the stairs and past the sleeping nurse. But he promptly drops his deathly syringe when he realizes that his wife is no longer quite his wife; she has transformed into something much greater. This time, it is not a mottled alien hand that bursts into the frame but Nancy’s giant, manicured fingers.

In the United States, the average height for those assigned female at birth is five foot four. I have that beat by about eight inches; Nancy has it beat by nearly forty-five feet, her body taking up every corner of the room in a display reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland. Dr. Cushing rushes in to investigate. He pokes and prods at Nancy, ordering that she be given forty pints of plasma and a hefty dose of morphine with an “elephant syringe.” Then he calls in a second opinion.

Both doctors are utterly stumped. What to do with this giant woman? they ask. What to do, what to do. “I don’t know,” they say, hoping to find a medical solution. “I just don’t know. We will find our answer when we operate.” “You feel there’s hope?” one says. “With surgery,” says the other. When Nancy inevitably awakens, calling out for a Harry who is now back at the bar with his redheaded lover, we see that the doctors have chained her up. Watching her in captivity, I wondered how different this was from her time at the sanitarium.

*

Around the time the movie came out, a synthetic estrogen treatment for “managing” the growth of very tall girls was growing in popularity. Initially developed by physicians in the mid-1940s, these weren’t the first hormone injections aimed at treating women for things that didn’t quite need to be treated; in the late nineteenth century, according to a 2006 paper in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, nurses and midwives would collect extracts from the ovaries of animals to help with amorphous conditions like “hysteria” and “debility.”

Being tall had effectively been pathologized. These injections were not meant to treat conditions that cause tallness—hyperthyroidism, for example, or Marfan Syndrome—or even conditions possibly brought on by extreme tallness, like atrial fibrillation. Instead, the treatment was specifically aimed at girls with “constitutional tall stature,” the medical term used to describe those whose tallness simply was. And still, parents and doctors alike advocated for medical intervention. When the treatment was first developed, the medically acceptable threshold for eligibility was a projected adult height of five foot nine. Today, the procedure is rare—but still considered an option for adolescent girls who show signs of hitting six foot two. Of course, various hormone treatments exist today that can be lifesaving and life-affirming; these injections, however, were neither.

A 1962 review of the efficacy of the injections noted that the “problem of excessive height in otherwise normal girls is evident.” But what exactly the problem was had not quite crystallized. Some of the parents’ concerns now read as dated, as with the respondents in a 1965 survey who expressed that tall girls face challenges in breaking into a career as an airline hostess. But many seem to be evergreen. A 2007 investigation in the Journal of Medical Ethics observes that the symptoms being treated were often lumped into the category of “psychosocial problems,” which could include “feeling different, being subject to hurtful comments, withdrawal from social activities, difficulties in finding appropriate clothes and difficulties in finding a partner.” All, it bears mentioning, problems created by other people.

No data exists to indicate how many girls have been given these injections over the past sixty-odd years, but they almost certainly number in the thousands. What we do know is that possible side effects included ovarian cysts, missed periods, excessive uterine bleeding, and increased risks of infertility. One Australian survey found that “while untreated women were almost unanimously glad they were not treated (99.1%), no matter how tall they became, 42.1% of the treated women expressed dissatisfaction with the decision that was made.” And yet, I wonder, how many of us would still have done it, had we been presented the option?

“All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine,” wrote the feminist film theorist Barbara Creed, “of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.” The Medical Ethics paper, citing both the existing literature and the author’s own interviews, notes that “the experiences of a tall mother are often the main reason why treatment is sought for a tall girl.”

*

Women and girls are so often told, in ways both obvious and insidious, that we are not supposed to take up too much space. My tall body has often felt like a violation of this tacit rule of smallness, both a disruption and a liability.

Because of a general notion that women should be smaller than men, my height almost always makes me stand out to strangers, who frequently feel the need to talk—audibly—about me, as if I am an oversized object. I have heard comments on my height from people on street corners as I stare at my phone, waiting for the walk sign to change. I have heard them in elevators and I have heard them on escalators. I have heard them, loudly, from a repairman on his way to fix a flickering light, while I was working my student job on the quiet floor of the college library. He walked past me carrying a very large ladder, then stopped in his tracks and said, “Wow, you’re a tall one!” I gave him a grimace-smile, then turned back to the shelf I was restocking. He remained there, silently, for what felt like a minute.

I have heard these comments from prospective dates and successful dates and men in bars and stores and airplanes and national parks. For as long as I can remember, I have heard them from relatives, friends, friends’ parents, teachers, and volleyball coaches trying to recruit me. The remarks usually have relatively little substance beyond informing me—or the speaker, or anyone in the general vicinity—that I am, in fact, tall. Each time, I wonder: Do they really think I don’t know?

Studies about the experiences of tall women show that this is not unusual. Of all the things participants have reported—bullying, fetishization, lack of understanding from their shorter friends who just don’t get it—a common thread seems to be that strangers feel free to use their bodies as conversation starters. It seems that something about a woman standing out above the rest is cause for further inquiry. I feel a particular kinship with a respondent in one study, conducted at the University of South Florida, who noted that comments on her height “made her aware of her body” for the first time. For her, it escalated “to the point where she considered herself a ‘freak.’” For me, even the acute awareness was, for a time, its own kind of punishment.

This exhausting state of being perpetually noticed often made me not want to be noticed at all. And sometimes, the noticing crossed a line into something else. Once, as I rode the metrobus home during my sophomore year of high school, an older man struck up a conversation with me. He asked me about my favorite subjects, whether I played sports, whether I liked my school. He asked my age. He asked me how tall I was. I was not as accustomed as I am now to ignoring men on public transportation who ask too many questions. And I didn’t know, as I do now, that inquiries about bodily measurements rarely come from a place of innocent curiosity. Something in his face changed when he asked me where I lived. I went silent, pulled the wire for the next stop, and got off the bus, miles from home. “Five-nine already,” he said as I stepped out the door. “Damn.”

I can’t stay when, exactly, I stopped growing. I think if that were a possible thing to know, if there was some sort of countdown clock and I could identify the precise second where my body finally decided to give it a rest, I probably would have celebrated. A dark thought, though, still has the power to tug at me when I let it: What if it never stops? What if I become so grotesquely long that I simply flop over and break in half?

*

The concept of body horror was first posited by the cinema critic Philip Brophy in his 1983 paper “Horrality: The Textuality of the Contemporary Horror Film.” The idea is fairly straightforward: This subgenre of horror hinges on the modification, mutation, or mutilation of the human corpus. (Isn’t having a body horrifying enough?) “The contemporary Horror film,” Brophy writes, “tends to play not so much on the broad fear of Death, but more precisely on the fear of one’s own body, of how one controls and relates to it.” Such films are so effectively horrifying precisely because “the fictional body,” that which is portrayed on-screen, “is as helpless as its viewing subject.”

Attack of the 50 Foot Woman might be taken as an early example of the form: After all, the core conflict arises from stretching bones, bursting muscles, and limbs made unruly. (Brophy writes that such films “accentuat[e] the very presence of the body on the screen,” which happens here in the most literal way.) The classic science fiction of the 1950s, so reliant on themes of infiltration, contamination, and bodily tricks like shape-shifting and size-switching, helped set the stage for the cinematic landscape Brophy came up in.

He would later describe 1983 as “the peak of a small ‘golden period’ of the contemporary horror film.” Films that debuted in the early 80s include Videodrome, in which a man’s body opens up to become a cassette player; The Evil Dead, in which bodies become fleshy killing machines controlled by demons; and The Thing, in which onscreen bodies, human and otherwise, are revealed to be not bodies at all, but rearranged forms of some mysterious parasitic organism. The common, disturbing thread: We do not have inherent control over our own bodies. In fact, human bodies are sometimes not what they appear and have endless potential for change.

This golden period also saw a flare-up of discussion over what makes a monster monstrous—what makes a horror film horrific. Many scholars agreed that it had something to do with difference. “The concept of a border is central to a construction of the monstrous in the horror film,” Creed wrote in 1986. For her, the role of a monster is to cross one of those borders that already exist in our world: “between human and inhuman . . . normal and the supernatural, good and evil . . . the border which separates those who take up their proper gender roles from those who do not.” The monster, in crossing it, reinforces that it should be uncrossable.

Body horror, then, reflects back our ingrained assumptions about what a body should be—and should be capable of. “That which crosses or threatens to cross the ‘border’ is abject,” Creed writes. “Although the specific nature of the border changes from film to film, the function of the monstrous remains the same.”

*

“At what point do you think being tall became a good thing?” asks my dad, after I tell him about my research into the hormone treatment and the panic that seems to have gripped 1950s parents of oversized girls. He is surprised that the hormone treatment ever happened; I am surprised that he is surprised. I am also surprised that he thinks tallness is always good, though he does make reassuring comments like this every so often, perhaps because he had a tall sister himself and knows what it can be like.

“You know,” he says, “they say the taller of the candidates usually wins the presidential election.” He’s not wrong, necessarily. Scholars of human behavior note that tallness tends to correlate with social status. In the US, the average person will overreport their height—a phenomenon that has been described as “social desirability bias.”

But further research confirms what I already knew: that there may be something of a “ceiling height” to all this, a limit to what is considered normal, after which the alleged advantages may give way to stigma. One study has suggested that women’s satisfaction with their height is at its peak for those between five foot eight and five foot ten. Six feet, or fifty, is a different story. And stigma for women who break that particular glass ceiling is magnified for those who are tall but not white, not cis, not able-bodied, not thin.

Look to media and myth and you’ll see that a woman who is too tall is something to be feared. She can keep up with the men, or even fall in line with them—like Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones, who can swing a battle-ax with ease and bite the ear off a man even larger than her (but whose inner, sensual life is mostly a mystery). Or maybe she titillates with her destructive power; see macrophilia, which usually manifests as a desire in men to be overpowered, or even eaten, by a very tall woman. Playboy reports that, between 2014 and 2015, Pornhub searches for “giantess” increased by 1,091 percent. It’s all too easy, I have discovered, to find elaborate YouTube montages stringing together all of Allison Hayes’s fifty-foot woman scenes, to be used for unknown—read, prurient—purposes.

Perhaps the most famous trope of the tall woman in the Western canon is the Amazon, a woman often described as being “unusually” tall and muscular—and one who threatens the power of the patriarchy itself. The origin of the word Amazon is not entirely clear, but the meaning couldn’t be more so; etymological theories posit translations such as “husbandless,” “virility-killing,” and “without breast.” (It was believed that the Amazons would cut off one breast, so as to more easily draw the strings of their bows.) These descendants of Ares—natives of a distant and dangerous land, either Libya or the Black Sea, depending who you ask—were a mythological thorn in the side of ancient Greeks, whose art enshrined defeats of Amazon warriors as a record of enlightenment prevailing over savagery.

The Amazons lived a life mostly uninterrupted by men outside the context of war. They were sometimes depicted wearing pants. They were, as the classicist Peter Walcot has noted, “as monstrous in their own fashion as the snake-limbed Giants or half-horse Centaurs and a race just as expressive of the forces which threaten to destroy civilized life.” The tall woman, in other words, was a threat to the entire realm of man.

And for three thousand years, more or less, the idea of the Amazon has been used liberally as a misogynistic epithet for women who threaten to cross these unspoken borders. In the years following the French Revolution, for instance, a number of politically astute women saw that once-sacrosanct social hierarchies were becoming slippery as political power was redistributed, traditions smashed, and new titles, calendars, and religions created. Some women took advantage of the relative chaos to attempt to gain some political power. They sat in on meetings of the Jacobins, who had helped overthrow the old monarchy and who dominated French politics for several years afterward, finding ways to mingle with (male) members whose number they were not officially allowed to join. This was not entirely popular. One foreign observer, noticing a woman descending from the upper gallery to actually take a seat in the main hall, likened her to the mythical man-eater. “On inquiry, I was informed that the name of this amazon is Mademoiselle Theroigne. [She] has a smart martial air, which in a man would not be disagreeable.” Just as the Amazons, she is, to this man at least, taking up an unnatural, almost savage amount of space.

I do not believe that a tall woman is a monstrous thing—in fact, quite the opposite. But I do believe that, when my friends set me up on a blind date, I should make sure the guy knows how tall I am; that I should wear big headphones on the train, just in case someone wants to tap on my shoulder and ask; that every time a stranger tells me, with mock terror, that I look “like I could kick his ass,” something in him is actually terrified. I believe the studies in which tall women report an “inability to be feminine,” defining “the ideal female body as being petite and dainty,” and the studies that show that shorter and smaller women are perceived to be more expressive, more thoughtful, more nurturing. Softer, more sensual. Code, probably, for more woman, as much as that means anything at all.

I also believe their findings that the taller a woman is, the more she is perceived to be strong, assertive, ambitious, intelligent, affluent, professionally successful. I believe you already know what’s wrong with strong, assertive, ambitious, intelligent, affluent, professionally successful women.

*

What is the function of the monstrous in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman? Where are the borders drawn? I see them in familiar places, delineating the same cognitive dissonances of my own life: between masculine and feminine, big and small, powerful and powerless, longed for and longing, taker and taken. Nancy smashes them all, and her transformation, visceral in the most literal way, is one my own body remembers.

At the end of the film, Nancy goes on a rampage. How could she not? She finally has all the power: to force her husband to stay faithful, to pick him up, to lock him up, to make demands. She awakens from her morphine coma, easily breaks her bindings, and lumbers away wrapped in a bedsheet. Townspeople look up at the massive woman, frozen in place as she stomps down the street. A pair of police officers try to track her down by following a trail of giant footprints. “She’ll tear up the whole town until she finds Harry,” says one to the other. “Yeah, and then she’ll tear up Harry.”

There are other plot points here and there: something about diamonds, which are used to power alien ships in one of those futuristic alternative-energy subplots that proliferated around this time. But this is most of all a story of a woman who is, and does, too much. Nancy shows us the lengths she might go to gain control of herself and her circumstances, and she gets what is coming to her. She is unmanageable, and so too her body becomes.

Eventually, arriving at the bar, Nancy squishes the mistress with a wooden beam and picks up a wriggling Harry like a worm in her hand. She holds him, as though to behold him. She knows, now, who she is in relation to her husband, what he’s actually worth. Gunshot after gunshot rings out to no effect—how difficult this woman is to kill! Until the sheriff pulls out a rifle, blowing up a telephone pole and knocking her to the ground. She has fallen, her pulse gone. Harry writhes in her dead hand, then goes limp, too. Says the doctor, “She finally got Harry all to herself.”

*

For a few days after I watched the film, the background noise of my brain mostly concerned imagining alternative storylines for Nancy, who in so many ways deserved better. What if she had been allowed to ask for more, without punishment? What if a big body weren’t a punishment at all? Why do the loud women always have to die? What if she had put her tiny husband down and walked back out into the desert, wandering through the cactus and into the moonlit mountains?

My idea of my own height only recently lined up with reality. I don’t know what exactly helped me get there. It was probably, as with anything, a gradual accumulation of minor events and small recalibrations: a conversation here, a casual touch there, time spent, self-talk, moving toward acceptance of the things I cannot change. Even still, I remember exactly the first time I was able to utter the words “six feet.” As I crossed the border and broke through the roof, I briefly felt that mix of fear and frenzy that comes when you know you’re about to give yourself over to the unknown.

What if Nancy’s very existence didn’t have to be an attack? What if her world required less navigating and let her simply be? I think often about how much we lose when we try to make our bodies behave. There is some power, I think, in feeling unmanageable. In surveys of very tall women, most report feeling more confident as time goes on: as they spend another year, and another after that, being themselves. The stooping and slouching slowly ceases; the anger at the world abates. As one respondent in a 2011 Texas Woman’s University study observed, “I had to grow into this body.”

Of course, the work of growing into your body never ends—you must constantly remind yourself that it is yours, touch it, put it into motion, listen to its different parts. Lately, as the nights have become long and cold, I have been taking extra time to move and stretch. I close my eyes and flop in half. When I roll up to stand up straight, my body feels seven, eight, a thousand feet tall.